Who Are You Calling Irresponsible?

Looking at Christian Responsibility in a Better Light

Marc Scott

Dec 10, 2022

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If you go online to GotQuestions.org you can find an extensive answer to the question, “What does the Bible say about Christian responsibility?”

Parts of the response found there include the following comments (in bold).1 My thoughts are below (in italics).

“This, then, is the believer’s responsibility: to stand firm in the faith and give himself completely to the Lord.”
- One of the primary responsibilities listed is taking a stand.
“…when our hope in the resurrection is clear and certain, we will have great motivation to be attending to the responsibility we have to ‘always giving ourselves to the work of the Lord’.”
- We are responsible to give ourselves to the “work of the Lord.” If that is the case, then it is critical that we define what constitutes the “work of the Lord.” It sure would be ideal if Jesus ever came out and did this explicitly and we could find it in the Bible. (Hint, He did, and we will later in this article.)
“The Bible teaches us that our responsibility as believers is to work uncompromisingly as the Lord has gifted us and leads us in this life. … We are responsible for our money, time, energy, talents, gifts, bodies, minds, and spirits, and we should invest in nothing that does not in some way contribute to the work of the Lord.”
- What I learn from this answer is that my gifts and talents are a big part of my responsibility.
“Simply put, our responsibility lies in working for the Lord, whether it is in ‘looking after orphans or widows in distress’ (James 1:27), giving to the hungry, the naked, visiting those in prison (see Matthew 25:35-36), serving in our workplace (see Colossians 3:22), or doing whatever we do (Colossians 3:23).”
- Many wonderful endeavors are listed here. So, it seems that the theme associated with Christian responsibility is work. The phrase “working for the Lord” is the simple expression of our responsibility according to this answer.

I open with these statements from GotQuestions.org because they are typical of the responses I often hear when people refer to being responsible Christians. It is all about what we must do to remain in good standing. The approach is similar to what you would find in a staff handbook of an organization. Being a good Christian for the Lord is comparable to being a good employee for the company, or so it is made to seem that way.

Is it, though? Are we meant to just take the word responsibility like the rest of the world and lay out a set of DO’s and DON’Ts?

I say an emphatic NO! Taking this usual perspective on what responsibility means in the Christian life misconstrues the gospel and removes the mystery and majesty of God’s love. Our to-do list makes us no different from any other religion or secular job description. That dramatically cheapens the sacrifice of Christ. There has to be a better way to look at Christian responsibility.

Before we do that, though, let’s highlight the main corrective to the GotQuestions.org response. It is not centered on Jesus. Paul’s words are quoted a lot. James is cited. A few of Jesus’s words in Matthew are included. But overall, it is the kind of response you get when one combs through Bible passages looking for phrases that tell people what they should do. It is a logical way to find the answer. It is just not the right way. They attempted to answer the question, “What does the Bible say about Christian responsibility?” The better question is, “What does Jesus say about Christian responsibility?”

This significant shift makes all the difference. Remember, the theme of their answer is that Christian responsibility equates to doing the work of God according to the Bible verses they selected. Well, guess what? There just so happens to be a verse in John 6:29 in which Jesus Himself clarifies, “The work of God is this: to believe in the one he has sent.”

Let’s start any discussion of Christian responsibility with Jesus. Instead of a list of tasks, He tells everyone that the work of God is not many things but one thing. God’s work is to believe in Jesus. To believe in Him is to first believe Him. Trust Him. Take Him at His word. That is the work God has given us.

Still, this question of Christian responsibility is one that does not go away so easily. So, let’s take a crack at it from another angle that still keeps Jesus at the forefront.

It is important to understand responsibility as response-ability. To be responsible is to be response-able. Simply, someone is only being responsible in as much as that person knows how to respond and can do so. You cannot hold someone responsible unless they have been equipped and supported with the knowledge and resources to know how to respond in a given situation. For instance, we cannot hold students responsible for learning in our education systems until we have provided them with effective ways to learn. We must literally teach them how to respond to new teachings. This view of responsibility is true in all kinds of endeavors. A person cannot be expected to respond to a play call in sports, a recipe in the kitchen, or a flat tire on the road without first being equipped for each of these situations. Most of the time, equipping involves modeling and practicing. Then, responsibility can be expected.

So when it comes to this idea of Christian responsibility, we must first ask, To what (or whom) are we responding? The Christian religion prepares people to respond to God's law. Jesus equips people to respond to God’s love. Everything about raising the next generation concerning faith rests upon this distinction.

A response to the law, which we are no longer under, demands that we do. We must know the laws and fear the enforcement of those laws. We must justify ourselves to the lawgiver. God is someone to be appeased. Our duty is to teach others how to follow the laws, as well. In this mindset, the response-able thing to do is teach our children what the Bible says about sin and hell and how to avoid both.

A response to love, on the other hand, demands that we receive. With God being Love, we enjoy and accept Him. The response-ability to love is freedom from the law.

When my daughters were young, we would play all kinds of games, have living room movie nights and “campouts,” dance, pretend, laugh, and read stories. We would imagine we were in an airplane taking off when we left the house in our car. On each occasion, my daughters would simply respond to their father’s love. They had to do nothing but receive the experience. They were free to enjoy the relationship.

The way we train our children to respond to love is the same way we would train a plant to respond to photosynthesis or teach a garden to receive rain. We do not have to convince the plant photosynthesis is necessary. We don’t tell our garden that rainfall is good for it. We do nothing but let it be. The only way there is a problem is if we block the sunlight from the plant over enough time or shield the garden from the rainfall. Likewise, our children are already designed and destined to receive God’s love just by being alive. There is only a problem if we come in with a different doctrine or gospel other than Christ that interrupts God’s pure love. When we tell our children what they must do to be good Christians, we put a canopy over the garden. We introduce a lie that obstructs the whole truth from getting through.

Could this be why Jesus did not keep telling us to make children like adults, but rather directed adults, on multiple occasions, to become like little children if they wanted to enter and understand the kingdom of God? Before my daughters were able to experience the fun times I described, each of them was an infant. As their parent, I did all of the work. I held them. I changed them. I fed them. They couldn’t even burp on their own. They had one job. Receive. Receive whatever the father did for them. With them.

This is the picture we can have in mind when we consider the “born again” experience. It is not captured in a declaration of a doctrinal belief. It is not in agreement with all the words of a “sinner’s prayer.” It is that time when we realize our one job in life is to receive the Father’s love, that it is all we are capable of and all we are meant to do. When we realize this state of full dependence, that is the new birth, new life. That is what it means to be born again.

Jesus had a conversation with a religious teacher and explained this point to him. He told him it is impossible to see God’s kingdom without being born again. In John 3, when the man, named Nicodemus, expressed confusion at the idea, Jesus clarified that a person must be born of the Spirit. Then, He described just how out of our control this experience is. “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with anyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:6-8).

Jesus emphasizes that He is the only one qualified to talk about how anything works related to heaven. No one else has been there and no one else can describe how to get to heaven so all of our talk about how to obtain eternal life is foolish. It is a simple matter of making sure everyone knows eternal life is found in believing in Jesus. This conversation is the context for the most quoted verse in the Bible, John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”2

Sometimes, you might find it worthwhile to read John 15 while making a list of what God (the Vine) does and what we (the branches) do in the parable. It is remarkable how prevalent the subtle teaching is throughout the New Testament that we are indeed meant to simply remain and receive while God is the force at work. If we are able to respond to that truth, then we have found the heart of Christian responsibility. At the same time, ironically, we find out that most of what we are told is Christian responsibility is quite an irresponsible view of the gospel.

I want to close with an excerpt from the pen of DeVern Fromke, a teacher and author whose ministry spanned much of the 20th century as he traveled to many places around the world. He wrote:

The basic lesson for time or eternity that we as humans are to learn is that we are vessels capable of containing God. The distortion of life that we got as a consequence of the fall makes it appear that life is “activity.” We like to live, to use our minds and wills. But the truth is that the secret of life is not activity, it is receptivity.
God is the invisible Person, the only real Person in the universe. He is the love, the life, the wisdom, the all; but being an invisible Person, He must have a means of manifestation. The whole universe manifests Him and shows forth His glory, but God is still a Person. And you cannot see a person just in light, or in music, or in color. You can see something of him, but you cannot see that he is a person.
So God created persons to express His own Person by them. The basic purpose of human beings therefore should be to become the vessels that contain Him. That means our permanent habit has to become receptivity rather than activity.
Love always makes it as easy as it can. God is love, and He has made humanity as easy as He can. If life is not easy for us, it is because we are not quite right yet. And the easiest possible function a person can conceive of is the function of receptivity. You just receive what is poured on you; you just take it. Nothing else.
If you look at nature, you see that a tree does not produce one leaf by activity. Vegetation receives. It has sunlight and moisture poured on it. What it receives it uses, but activity is only a product of receptivity. Thus did I begin to learn the basic secret of life.3

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